Time banking is a common practice in companies in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, and is becoming more common in the U.K. These companies often have full time salaried employees, but have large seasonal variations in their incoming volume of work. The incoming volume is work such as call volume and emails in a call center, insurance claims in a back office, or the like.
Instead of using over time or part-time employees to meet the variable load, these companies enter into an agreement with their full-time employees to work longer hours during busy times of the year, and fewer hours during slow times of the year. The agreement ensures that throughout the course of the year the employees still end up working the same total number of hours that they would have worked in a normal year with a set number of hours per week. Employees “bank” hours when they work more than the normal amount of time, and withdraw from the “bank” when they work less than the normal number of hours.